Let's talk about Dutch (baby)

[shermarama]

Dutch: I'm working on it.

• I can usually take a stab at what anything written means, but there's a good chance I'll miss the subtleties. For example, I could tell a house advert I was looking at earlier today was talking about smoking and pets, and that pets required discussion ('overleg'), but I thought smoking was banned when actually they were saying it was allowed.
• Overhearing people speak Dutch, I can pick out some common words, understand some simple conversations - earlier today I was looking at a flat and the key the agent had wouldn't open the front door of the block, and another resident coming in couldn't get his key (sleutel) to work either, and then some other people were coming out and said yes, the keys aren't working, and the bloke said he'd ring the maintenance people, and I was quite pleased with how much of the conversation I followed.
• However, natural stage fright and general impostor syndrome kicks in when anyone says anything to me in Dutch. I go completely blank and can't even remember how to say things like thanks or sorry, *even though sorry is understandable in Dutch as the word for sorry*. That possibly makes things worse; someone says something I totally don't follow and I say sorry and they say it again, assuming maybe I just didn't hear. I was quite embarrassed in the supermarket yesterday when the woman at the till had to point at the screen to indicate that she wondered if I had the fifteen cents in change. 
• Because numbers, man, numbers, I can't hear numbers yet. I've only just worked out today that I've been struggling to hear the difference between two and three because I had the wrong idea of what three was. Twee (pronounced 'tvay') and drie (pronounced 'dree') aren't actually confusable, dammit. 
• Suppressing the inner sniggering teenager is hard sometimes. 'U bent hier', says the sign on the map, and that's the polite way of putting it. Okay, the informal way of saying 'you are here' is 'je bent hier', which isn't much different, apart from including the confusing second-person singular pronoun 'je', as opposed to the French 'je' which is the first-person, which is 'ik' in Dutch, with a hard k so not like 'ich' in German, unlike the letter 'g' which is like the ch in 'loch', which leaves the word for 'gladly', 'graag', which you add to things to make them politer, (therefore saying 'ik wil graag' for 'I would like' instead of 'ik wil', 'I want'), into a word which starts with clearing your throat, proceeds through a rolled 'r' and then a long posh 'a', and finishes with clearing your throat again. Which means that asking for something politely involves a word where you clear your throat twice, go 'aaaa' inbetween, and try and wedge some sort of 'r' in the middle. Thanks, Dutch. (This bit edited because I'd been spelling it 'garaag', not 'graag'. 'Garaag' means 'garage'. Ahem.)
• Also on the sniggering teenager front, the verb can or to be able to is kunnen, so it's a good job the Bob the Builder theme tune says 'yes we can', 'ja, wij kunnen', and not 'yes you can', or the Dutch equivalent would go 'ja, u kunt'. 
• Incidentally, consider the 'ij' in the 'wij' above to be equivalent to a y with an umlaut, pronounced something like 'ey', because sometimes when written that's what it is anyway. If you're looking for Rijnsburgstraat in a map index, it's somewhere after Ruysstraat, not between Rigelstraat and Rimastraat. 
• Meanwhile, mushrooms = champignons. GET YOUR OWN WORD, NEDERLANDERS.
• Keeping the conjunctions and articles and other little words straight is tricky because they often either do mean or sound like they ought to mean something else in English. Over in Dutch means about in English, and op means of, but of means or, and van also means of, but the word for than is dan, and that also means then. Which at least explains why people have trouble keeping than and then straight. That is dat but this is dit, not dis, so this and that is dit en dat, because en is and, but don't confuse it with een, which is one, but also the indefinite article a. You can tell these apart in speech because en sounds like the letter name en, and een the number is emphasised, like 'eyn', while een the indefinite article just has a schwa, a lazy e like an unstressed 'un'. See? No, neither do I. Yet. 

I suspect a good way to try and get started with talking will be to try and say things in Dutch to the dive club. They're generally willing to talk to us on account of the shared experience of diving, although some are more willing to do it in English than others, and so they'll probably put up with us trying things out. And it was quite surreal to come up from a dive and not be able to join in with the general 'how was your dive, what did you see' sort of chat. For a thing where you can't really talk while doing it, diving has a massive social element. Mind you, we did a dive on Monday and what we could see was not much. Never mind. Ik ga naar Albert Heijn, omdat ik wil aardappels kopen. Except I'm not sure if the wil ought to be the other side of the aardappels because of the omdat effect. Ahahahahaha.